“How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color of your eyes and the shape of your face the pattern on your palm and the moods that will shadow you through your life. How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives shuddering outward and outward like sheet lightning.”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
“Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep. ”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
“What if she never knows the end of the story? She shudders, and her mind continues to lurch forward into the future, that simple expectation of time passing - another moment, and another moment. It seems impossible that it will abruptly cease. It seems impossible that you will never know what happens next, that the thread you've been following your whole life will just... cut off, like a book with the last pages torn out. That doesn't seem fair, she thinks.”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
“It's hard to believe that this is how it's done. That this is how we get here into the world, by accident or design, the microscopic pieces of ourselves borne by fluids and blood and growing into a tiny kingdom of cells inside someone else's body It seems so difficult to become alive. So improbable.”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
“The baby's large eyes settled on him, and though this has been one of his happiest nights in his whole life, it made him melancholy. He had read somewhere that babies are instinctively drawn to faces, that they will fixate even on drawings or abstract, facelike shapes, and round objects with markings that might resemble eye-mouth-nose. It was information that struck him as terribly sad, terribly lonely - to imagine the infants of the world scoping the blurry atmosphere above them for faces the way primitive people scrutinized the stars for patterns, the way castaways stare at the moon, the blinking of a satellite. It made him sad to think of the baby gathering information - a mind, a soul, slowly solidifying around these impressions, coming to understand cause and effect, coming out of a blank or fog into reality. Into a reality. The true terror, Jonah thought, the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die, but that we were all born, that we were all once little babies like this, unknowing and slowly reeling in the world, gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn't exist and then, through no fault of our own, we had to.”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
“There is hardly anything at all. His life is suddenly a large, empty house, with each vacant room waiting to be furnished. His made-up wife. His invented father. His pretend childhood. He wonders if it is possible to unlie yourself. ”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
“It's hard to believe that this is how it's done. That this is how we get here into the world, by accident or design, the microscopic pieces of ourselves borne by fluids and blood and growing into a tiny kingdom of cells inside someone else's body. It seems so difficult to become alive. So improbable. . .
How can it be possible? she wonders. How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color of your eyes and the shape of your face, the pattern on your palm and the moods that will shadow you through your life. How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments, each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives, shuddering outward and outward like sheet lightning.”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
“Her name...was Mrs. marina Orlova, and she had grown up in Siberia. Later, she would tell him that she loathed the American custom of constantly smiling: "They are like chimpanzees," she said, in her bitter exclamatory voice. She grimaced, baring her teeth grotesquely. "Eee!" she said. "I smile at you! Eee! It is repulsive.”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
“The first time she had tried to kill herself, she had intuited that there was no escape. She had seen, with sudden clarity, that her life was a series of boxes, a maze that she would run and run through and never find an exit, and she thought, almost peacefully, I don't want it. I don't want my life.”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
Dan Chaon
Born place: in Omaha, Nebraska, The United States
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“Flawed, imperfect creatures! That's what we both are, oga! That's what we ALL are!”
― Nnedi Okorafor, quote from Who Fears Death
“He found himself grinning at her. His nervousness had disappeared, and suddenly he had a sense of his own size, his physical strength, his own brains and being. Four years, he had earned his own bread and keep, fended for himself, had not only remained alive and well but had put together a small fishing fleet of his own, and kept it alive and functioning and fought the wind and the weather and met a payroll of eleven men in his crews-and be damned with the lot of them if he'd go into a funk over which spoon or knife to use.”
― Howard Fast, quote from The Immigrants
“Jer, put do najintimnijeg dela našeg bića znači dugo putovanje kroz druge ljude i svetove. Tako sam se vratio ocu. Ali, kao što obično biva, tada je već bilo prekasno. Da sam onda znao da ga poslednji put vidim krepkog, da sam slutio kako ću ga dvadeset pet godina kasnije zateći pretvorenog u prljavu hrpu kostiju i iznutrica u raspadanju, kako me tužno gleda iz dubine tih očiju koje maltene nisu više pripadale ovom svetu, tada bih pokušao da razumem tog grubog, ali dobrog, snažnog, ali naivnog, naprasitog, ali čestitog čoveka. Izgleda, uvek kasno shvatamo svoje najbliže. A kada počnemo da stičemo izvesnu umešnost življenja, već dođe vreme da mremo. Što je najgore, već su pomrli oni na koje bismo najradije primenili stečenu veštinu.”
― Ernesto Sabato, quote from On Heroes and Tombs
“Some things just take time to process, and one must have healthy boundaries of time and space in place in order to do so. Simply put: BOUNDARIES + PROCESSING = BUFFERING Buffering is that time you spend waiting for the pixels of your life to crystallize into a clearer picture; it’s a time of reflection, a time of pause, a time for regaining your composure or readjusting your course. We all have a limited amount of mental and emotional bandwidth, and some of life’s episodes take a long time to fully load.”
― Hannah Hart, quote from Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded
“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Slaughterhouse-five: The Children's Crusade, A Duty-dance with Death
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